Brexit: poisson

By Richard North - November 30, 2020

If all we’ve got to go on regarding the TransEnd talks is comment by Dominic Raab on the Marr Show from early Sunday morning, then basically there is no news. 

That fishing is still a bone of contention certainly isn’t news, and you would have to be extremely naïve if you were to believe that he would say anything other than he was “confident of an agreement” – except that he didn’t. That was The Sun’s version of the interview.

That same paper is also talking about a deal having to be reached by Saturday, to allow it to be voted on by both the Westminster and the European parliaments, although we don’t even get an anonymous source to substantiate that.

Raab, on the other hand, is talking about the possibility of leaving on “Australia-style rules”, which just goes to show that the infection with the “ignorance” meme has spread throughout the political elites, to the point where they are just jabbering nonsensical terms.

On the government’s news grid for today, though, is agricultural reforms, which is what we are now supposed to be talking about – to keep our minds off more pressing matters.

The one person we haven’t heard very much from, though, is Barnier, and all those wonderfully anonymous EU sources seem to have gone silent for the moment, despite talks having finished as late at 10pm last night.

At the end of the talks, when asked if the negotiators had got any closer to reaching an agreement, Michel Barnier simply replied: “poisson”. That must qualify as one of the shortest – even if meaningful – comments on the conduct of the negotiations.

But nothing can be inferred from the silence. We still have room for the “dramatic” last-minute intervention from Johnson, carefully stage-managed to give him the maximum of exposure, and opening the way for more of his facile comments.

Whether Johnson will want to be too closely associated with any deal, however, is anyone’s guess. Given that it is likely to be thin gruel, with considerable disruption expected in the new year, whatever is agreed, the man might want to put some distance between himself and the talks.

It is probably too late for another “tiger in your tank” pep-talk, so all we can expect is a last-minute session to agree concessions which will pave the way for a deal. But if that associates Johnson too closely with a poor deal, he might want to let Frost “own” the agreement, and throw him to the wolves.

A highly publicised agreement on “poisson”, though, might conceal other defects in the deal, in the short-term, and give Johnson enough material to declare a “fantastic deal” and move on, in the hope that the coming “Covid Christmas” will keep the hacks from digging too deep into the detail.

But what Johnson needs to realise is that you only have to take one “s” out of poisson and it becomes a word with a very different meaning. That might be his true legacy of Brexit.